


All the Comforts of Home

by calumTraveler



Category: Myst Series
Genre: Don’t copy to another site, Fireplaces, Gen, POV Second Person, climbing into tight spaces, dealing with trauma by hiding inside a fireplace, mild spoilers for the main 4 games, thunder storms
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-07
Updated: 2019-09-07
Packaged: 2020-10-11 13:15:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,072
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20546753
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/calumTraveler/pseuds/calumTraveler
Summary: The Stranger has a strange comping mechanism when it comes to scary events.





	All the Comforts of Home

You'd fled into a used bookstore to escape some rather annoying drama in town. The kind involving people fighting in the streets. That was how you found the Myst Book tucked away in a corner next to a disused fireplace.

Safety, and yet, not.  
  
On Myst Island, the Fireplace had become something of a strange place of comfort for you during those early days of exploring mysterious worlds linked to from arguably magic books.

_It was the only door on the island that wasn't operable from the outside._

Oh, sure, you could close the Library door from the inside, seemingly the only way through... but surely there was a way to open it from the outside if it were closed.

The Fireplace though? There was no unlocking that Fireplace when somebody was inside of it. It was the perfect place to sleep during rest periods between searching the Ages of Myst.

And if someone less than savory realized what they had when they found the Myst Book that had SENT you here? Well. You didn't want to leave yourself sleeping out in the open.

And then finding the code for K'veer's hiding spot? Meeting Atrus? The Fireplace became more than just a somewhat safe place to sleep.

It was the only bridge you had to another person.

Years later, even after escaping Riven and saving Catherine and her people, fireplaces that were large enough to crawl inside became your safe spaces. You made sure to rebuild your old unused fireplace at home to be big enough to enter, and not only that, lockable from the inside only.

You kept the Myst Book hidden away in a secret panel in the stone work, just in case you ever needed it again.

Atrus loved his large climbable fireplaces too. The one in his and Catherine's bedroom in Tomahna might not have been closable as you'd liked, but after returning from Narayan, Descriptive book for Releeshan safely in hand... You just crashed in there for a few hours to get your wits about you again.

...Funnily enough, it was the first time Atrus or Catherine had picked up on your little habit.

"...Ah, my Friend," Atrus would ask you. "What are you doing?"

Admittedly, your response was slightly more sarcastic than intended, "I'm meditating in your fireplace. What's it look like, Atrus?"

When Catherine asked, "Why do you liked Fireplaces so much?" and she found out you'd been sleeping in the Myst Library Fireplace all those years ago, she was astonished and somewhat horrified. "Why didn't you sleep in a bed!?"

"They weren't anywhere near as safe on Myst at the time," you answered honestly. "Not with that Myst Book out in the open."

The next time you came by, they'd remodeled the thing to be a bit larger, have a closing grate, as well as an elevator function to a small cave down below their bedroom.

You appreciated the thought, because, well, it would be a little bit weird just to camp out in their bedroom's fireplace if you had a panic attack or something.

It didn't happen all that often, but sometimes, some misadventure of Atrus' would leave you feeling the need to just... ZONE OUT in a fireplace for a few good hours.

So what if you found small, square spaces comforting??

Big deal.

Well, it did turn out to be a big deal when Yeesha was somewhere around four or five- you'll lean five because why the heck not- there was a rather large thunderstorm that went through the area and it reminded you of some bad times in Stoneship, and Yeesha, well... the poor girl had never seen a storm this bad before.

So as the designated baby sitter and because her parents were off doing who knew what on Tay, you secreted Yeesha way into the fireplace, and you both sat there, watching the storm from relative safety.

You even dug into one of the Journals Atrus had a habit of leaving you to peruse whenever you came to visit. After the accidental help the Journal he'd given you before the whole Stolen Releeshan thing, you weren't going to look a gift journal in the proverbial mouth and Atrus was just going to trust his instincts that he gave you something helpful if push came to shove.

This was one of the times where the journal wasn't much of a match for the current situation, but regaling Yeesha about another one of Atrus' experiments in making a stable journal ink that didn't mysteriously fade into oblivion out of nowhere was surprisingly more soothing and distracting from a thunder storm than it should have had any right being.

And that was how Atrus and Catherine found you hours later, still into the middle of a raging storm.

Just a babysitter and their charge, chilling in a fireplace, reading one of "Daddy's Journals!"

You didn't realized they were there until Catherine snapped a photograph with some D'ni camera device.

After that, the four of you camped out in Atrus and Catherine's bedroom and just waited for the storm to pass.

Of course, Catherine would give you some low-key shade about 'giving Yeesha the wrong ideas' when she would tell you, months later, that now whenever Yeesha got scared of something that she went to hide in the fireplace.

It was of no surprise then, that Atrus and Catherine put in the linking chamber in that grotto cave.

It was of no surprise, then, that Yeesha would seek there for safety when Sirrus came chasing after her first, and then secondly to Haven after the fact.

It was of no surprise, then, that not a few weeks after that whole horrible ordeal, that when you came by to visit again, you found Yeesha hiding away inside the fireplace, curled up with the blue bound journal containing Atrus' commentaries on Haven, mourning a loss that you couldn't easily fix without building a time machine.

It was of no surprise, then, that years later, when Yeesha had written her first age, Relto, for her parents, that when you finally got the grand tour, you saw that she had put a small wood fireplace outside the hut exactly where it should have been.

A fireplace can represent so many things, you remember telling her during that first night with the hefty storm. Warmth, safety...

But most of all, it represents all the comforts of home.

**Author's Note:**

> Friend of mine is playing through the Myst Series for the first time and is on Revelation. Some conversation about zoning out in the fireplace lead me to this idea.


End file.
